Abstract: The newly born area of Astroinformatics has emerged as an interdisciplinary area from Astronomy and modern information and communication technologies, based on the modern Internet developments. Recently, four institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences launched a joint project called Astroinformatics and aimed at the development of the necessary methods and techniques.

As a truly interdisciplinary area Astroinformatics has arisen from the need of ICT methods for preservation and exploitation of the scientific, cultural and historic heritage of astronomical observations. The Wide-Field Plate Data Base is an ICT project of the Institute of Astronomy, which has been launched in 1991, by the Working Group Wide-Field Sky Surveys of the International Astronomic Union (IAU) and is unique by its nature at the international level. So far 300,000 plates have been already digitized through several European research programs. As a result, image-data is collected with about 2TB size and it tends to rise up to 1PB. The access, manipulation and science data-mining of such a huge amount of information is a serious challenge for the ICT community and the efforts in this direction are funded by European scientific programs as COST Action 283, FP6 \& FP7 of the European Virtual Observatory, the Humboldt Foundation of Germany, and recently, by the Bulgarian National Science Foundation (Ministry of Education and Science of Bulgaria, DO-02-273 and DO-02-275).

Abstract: There has been a number of applications of Wavelet Analysis to the processing and compression of Astronomical images, see the works of F. Murtagh and J.-L. Starck. In several papers of J.-L. Starck and coauthors they apply the so-called curvelets which were developed by D. Donoho (Stanford) and Emannuel Candes (Caltech). The curvelets have appeared as an attempt to compensate the inability of the traditional multidimensional wavelets to catch the edge effects of multidimensional images. Although the curvelets provide a sparse representation of the two-dimensional images they are rather clumsy mainly due to the lack of genuine wavelet properties, and also since they are a highly redundant family. We propose to apply the polyharmonic wavelets (which have been developed by the author) for the analysis of Astroimages. Recently, they have shown an essential advantage over other methods at least for the representation and compression of chains.